


With Your Hand Holding Mine (You Make Me Want to Die)

by grayimperia



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 08:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10693266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: [Major Spoilers for V3]She places one of her too cold hands over his. “So what do you think, Amami-kun?” she says in a voice like a lullaby. “Let’s die together. You and me.”The knife held aloft in her other hand hovers over his neck. Amami doesn’t move an inch, but then again, it’s not like he’s surprised this is happening.-Amami burns bridges with Shirogane.





	With Your Hand Holding Mine (You Make Me Want to Die)

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for V3 endgame.

Three slits of light stare into his bleary eyes when Amami reaches out against the cold, metallic darkness and pushes the locker door open for the first time. His foot hits the floor with a sharp click in the surreal world of the classroom, and the locker next to his explodes with sound. 

He spins on his heel and the door is forced open before him. His arms held open in surprise fail to catch the panicked girl who falls out of the darkness and onto the cold tile floor. Her blue hair falls in a puddle around her, and she looks up at him through rounded glasses with pupils the size of pinpricks. 

Amami kneels down beside her, and she screams in his face. 

-

She says her name is Shirogane Tsumugi with pursed lips. She is also absolutely terrified of him but her grip on his hand is iron when they run through the dark, twisting halls. There’re monsters behind them, and Amami pulls her along behind him, her torn nails biting bloody crescent moons into his palm. 

They arrive in a gym full of fourteen strangers, and Shirogane’s shaking even harder than before so he shows her the hand she marred. She blinks down on it, and he bows his head and says so quietly that only she can hear, “I think I’d rather fight one of those things than you, Shirogane-san.” 

With his frayed nerves and something too familiar clawing at the back of his mind, he gives her as reassuring a smile as he can, and she turns her pale face away. But the violent trembling in her shoulders has faded when she parts with him to stand near someone who scares her less. 

Amami stares after her, and the world becomes bright and shiny and then nothing.

-

Amami wakes up in darkness a second time. His ringed hand feels along the familiar door and pushes the locker open again. The bottoms’ of his shoes are not as hard, and he steps into the strange, brightly lit world without a sound. 

The locker next to his is silent. He doesn’t know why he expected it not to be. 

He reaches out and pushes the door of the classroom open. There are rings on his fingers and angry crescent moons on the palm of his hand.

-

The air in the school is stagnant, and he can’t shake the feeling of being a stalked prey animal until he rounds a corner and nearly knocks down a girl with long blue hair that falls straight down her back.

He takes a step back. She stares up at him with pupils like pinpricks and screams in his face. 

-

Shirogane Tsumugi is afraid of him but is also afraid to be left completely alone in the strange building. She follows close behind him, her heels tapping along down the overgrown corridors, light and quick and ready to bolt and leave him for dead the second a monster jumps out behind whatever door he carefully pushes open. 

She stays close behind and reminds him of a little sister with a blurry face he can’t remember. 

But he’s still grateful for her company when they slowly introduce themselves to fourteen similarly confused strangers meandering through the abandoned halls. They say their names and sometimes she wrings her wrists and other times she mumbles something quick and biting under her breath. Amami gives her a conspiratorial smile when she does the latter, and she turns her plain face away. 

When they are summoned to the gym and told to kill each other, Shirogane faints on the spot. Amami’s a second too late to catch her. 

-

He sits with her on the gym floor and takes the time to sort out his muddled memories. 

Almost everything in his head is a searing blur, his memories running together and swimming over each other like a half-finished collage. Amami fiddles with the strange rings on his fingers and wonders why he’s wearing them. He wonders if he’s the kind of person who wears so many rings that his fingers click and cling when he moves his hands. 

Amami recalls one vivid memory shining out like a flame in night. He’s sitting at a table, playing with the rings on his fingers, and someone shaking and paranoid stands up so fast that their chair clatters to the ground behind them. Their eyes are beady, and they point a trembling finger at the faces of fourteen colorful strangers, and say through gritted teeth that any of them could be planning something. Any of them could be monsters. 

Shirogane begins to stir beside him, and Amami lets the thought go. She slowly moves to sit up on her elbows. He hands her her round framed glasses, and she takes them without a word. 

She slides them on to her too plain face and looks around at the empty gym from their small corner. Her voice is quiet but still cuts through the stale air like a siren. “It wasn’t a dream then, was it?”

He shakes his head. Shirogane sits up and pulls her knees to her chest. Her hair cascades around her like a waterfall. 

She doesn’t make to move off of the cool wood floor, and Amami doesn’t prod her. In the silence, his memories resettle around him and the panicked voice points its finger at him and says that the real monsters don’t hide in shadows. The real monsters walk right up to you in the daylight and hide behind smiles and kind words, _and that any of them could be a monster._

Shirogane whispers, “Are we going to die here?”

Amami doesn’t have an answer so he says, “In this gym? Probably not.”

She shakes her head and sighs and says, “That isn’t what I meant,” but he’s got her away from thinking about their impending deaths when he stands and offers her a ringed hand.

She takes it.

-

The first body is swinging from a noose in the research room of someone really good at jump rope. 

All the color drains from Shirogane’s face when she sees it, but she does not faint or scream or cling to his hand. Amami’s more horrified than he’s ever been in his entire life ( _but that’s not true, he’s seen worse, so much worse so many times before_ ), but gives her the most reassuring smile that he can. 

Shirogane doesn’t turn away from the corpse’s blue face. When the others disperse to discover which of their new friends is a monster, she smiles up at him and says, “I’m honestly just glad it wasn’t either of us.” 

She turns to begin investigating, her blue hair swinging and Amami openmouthed and chilled to the bone behind her.

-

Shirogane’s quiet but smart during the first trial. They stand next to each other, and Amami catches every muttered deduction and correction, echoing them loudly for her when the lives of thirteen strangers weigh too heavily. 

The killer thrashes and swears against his accusations and spits in Amami’s face before they’re dragged off by their neck, cursing the whole way.

Amami flinches, and flinches again when the execution begins, long and slow and painfully drawn out. He shouts above the roar of the whirring machines for everyone not to look when he knows the final blow is coming. 

He turns his face away, and sees their head fall from their body in the reflection of Shirogane’s round glasses. She’s the only one who keeps watching, and she’s also the only one to thank him for saving their lives.

After the execution, Shirogane smiles up at him with shining eyes. 

-

They drop like flies. The déjà vu makes his head spin. Shirogane veers between a frazzled wreck and a quick-witted commander whenever a corpse rears its ugly head. 

She looks at him very seriously one night when they’re alone in one of the classrooms, the sunset staining them orange and red like they’re burning. She says, “We have to be getting close to the end. There aren’t many of us left,” she reaches out and places one of her hands over his. “As long as we stick together, I think we can make it out alive.” She smiles, “just the two of us.”

The sixth mangled body shows up, and Shirogane lets out a sigh of relief when she sees Amami alive after hearing the body announcement. The corpse’s entire arm has been removed, and she skips over to him, blue hair swinging.

Shirogane makes his stomach churn. 

-

There are five of them left when Shirogane knocks him to the floor of his bedroom and wraps her thin fingers around his neck like spider legs. There isn’t pressure yet, just a threat, and Amami simply watches her without moving a muscle. 

Her pupils are pinpricks when she says, “Y-you’re not screaming for help.”

He regards her coldly. “And you’re not killing me.”

Her grip tightens, but Amami’s still breathing. “I-I could.”

He looks up at her through his long lashes, and gently places his hands over hers. He doesn’t pry them off. “You could,” he agrees. “I’m not going to fight you, Shirogane-san.”

Shirogane’s eyes widen, and she jumps away as if her hands were suddenly lit on fire. She scrambles backwards. Amami rubs at his bruised neck. 

Neither of them speak of it the next day, and Shirogane places her hand over his like he’s forgiven her. She squeezes his hand like she couldn’t do to his throat, and he doesn’t squeeze back. She keeps squeezing until her manicured nails bite bright crescent moons into his palm. 

-

There are five of them left, and Amami knows exactly who the mastermind among them is. Shirogane’s fidgeting at his side. Portraits of the dead stand at attention, framing everyone else. She isn’t the mastermind and she isn’t dead either. Part of him wishes that she was. 

The mastermind throws their arms out to their sides and proudly announces they’ve been defeated and that hope has once again won out over despair. Amami flinches and Shirogane shrieks when confetti shoots out of seemingly nowhere. They stand with the other two survivors when they watch the final execution. None of them look away, and Amami’s bleary eyes watch the light leave the mastermind’s.

Shirogane volunteered to be sacrificed with him, and when people flood the room to take them away to their new punishment, she grabs his hand with an iron grip. There are monsters all around them.

The other two are escorted back to the real world. A smiling receptionist in a waiting room kindly tells Shirogane and Amami that she has just survived her first killing game. He’s survived his fourth. 

Amami stares openmouthed. She turns her plain, pale, worried face up to him, and holds his hand tighter. 

Amami’s collage of memories is on fire. He grips her hand until she winces at his rings biting into her skin.

-

Waiting for the next game to begin nearly kills him. 

Shirogane comes to his room one night and shakes him awake with one hand because she’s holding a knife in the other. The sight of its shine cutting through the darkness causes Amami to jump to wakefulness. 

Shirogane’s shaking her head and shushing him and waving the knife around too close to his face. “No, no it’s okay,” she says. “This is for the best, okay? It’ll be really fast. I’ll do you, and then,” she swallows. “And then me right after.” 

Amami raises his eyebrows at her. The knife is still shining in her trembling hand. “You want to die?”

“No!” she shouts before clamping a hand over mouth. Then, much quieter, “I mean, of course I don’t but… what other options do we have?” Shakes her head. “You saw what happened in our game. I don’t want to die like that…” She closes her eyes. “I’d do anything not to die like that.”

“And you want me to die with you?” he asks slowly. 

Shirogane pulls a face. “I don’t know—maybe. I thought I’d offer.”

“Just to be polite?”

She frowns and lowers the knife. “You know what I mean. You know,” she says, “you scare me sometimes, Amami-kun. I always thought everyone was at least a little afraid to die… and then I met you.”

He stares at her blandly when she places one of her too cold hands over his. “So what do you think, Amami-kun?” she says in a voice like a lullaby. “Let’s die together. You and me.” 

The knife held aloft in her other hand hovers over his neck. He doesn’t move an inch, but then again, it’s not like he’s surprised this is happening. 

Amami looks up at her pupils wide as saucers in the darkness. He doesn’t say another word, and eventually she mumbles out “just forget it” like he said no to an invitation to prom. She takes the knife with her, and he’s only half-surprised when she greets him at breakfast the next morning like nothing happened. It’s not the first time she’s tried to kill him, after all.

-

An executive takes them aside and says that as returning survivors they have the option of being the mastermind of their next game. Shirogane jumps up so fast her chair clatters to the floor behind her. The executive smiles and says that Team DanganRonpa is happy to have her. Amami fiddles with his rings.

When they’re alone, Shirogane spins on her heel and laughs in his face. “Isn’t this great? Now we can work together and both make it out.” She grabs his fidgeting hands in both of hers. “We just have to get rid of everyone else, and then we can leave. The two of us can make it.”

He turns his face away and wrenches his hands out of her grasp. “Do what you want, but leave me out of it.” He stands, and his steps don’t make a sound when he calls over his shoulder. “I’m not going to fight you, Shirogane-san.” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, rings catching on loose tangles. “I’m tired of fighting monsters.”

Shirogane stares after him through her rounded glasses with her blue eyes on fire. 

-

Amami wakes up in darkness for the first time, and his head is such a mess that he nearly falls out of the strange locker when he pushes it open. His mind is burned to ashes, and he barely registers the rings on his fingers when he pushes the classroom door open. 

He stumbles through the abandoned school alone and nearly runs into a girl with long blue hair that falls straight down her back. He says his name and that he can’t remember anything else about himself.

His shoulders are shaking, and he’s on the edge of panic when she takes one of his hands with one of her manicured ones and gives him a kind smile.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the other interpretation of Amami & Shirogane pregame that I like. Also a quick note that the next chapter of my rewrite is going to come out a little later tomorrow than usual (though still at some point tomorrow).


End file.
